


reconnaissance

by deniigiq



Series: electric sheep [7]
Category: Daredevil (TV), Jessica Jones (TV), The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Androids, Artificial Intelligence, Gen, M/M, heavy karen and jess in this one, they are the dream team though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-11
Updated: 2018-03-11
Packaged: 2019-03-29 23:26:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13937688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deniigiq/pseuds/deniigiq
Summary: “Uh, I’m sorry ma’am, I think there’s been a mistake. We don’t have a Franklin Warner in our office, or uh, in any office at the university right now. We haven’t even had a Frank since like 2010.”Karen’s chest constricted. Hey, keep calm now, that was only like, the third worst possible thing that could happen.





	reconnaissance

**Author's Note:**

> karen and jess should have their own show. I'll fund it with all my pennies.
> 
> Bear with me, we eventually get back to Matt and Foggy.

“I understand, Miss Wing, but I don’t know how I can help you. Mr. Rand hasn’t authorized me to release any of his information and legally, I can’t give you anything without written consent from him. No, you can’t retroactively sign paperwork, even if you are his next of kin. Sorry, what? He’s not dead, Miss Wing, I don’t see how—no he’s not missing, he’s enrolled here I saw him just a few days ago. Uh, listen, I understand that this can be upsetting—oh. I’m afraid that if you do that I’ll be forced to call the police. Uh, sorry, I’m getting another call. Thank you for uh—oh thank god. She hung up.”

Karen deflated onto the desk. Jess leaned back from where she was cutting cardstock.

“Am I right, or am I right?” She gestured with a glue stick, “Girl is out of her damn mind. Might be a stalker. Has anyone told Rand?”

Karen side-eyed her and stubbornly ignored the ache in her back from her hunch. Of course nobody had told Rand. She’d asked Mabel who told her she’d pass on the message, but Karen wasn’t an idiot.

Danny wandered the halls like a lonely ghost. He settled down cross-legged in weird corners, like the one in Karen’s waiting room, where the wall met the window. He faced the wall, he always faced the wall, and then he closed his eyes and stayed there for hours at a time. Karen was willing to give most people the benefit of the doubt, but she was starting to suspect that Danny had a condition which made it hard for him to communicate with others.

“No,” she finally answered Jess, “I don’t think they have.” Jess pouted and continued her cutting and pasting.

“Hey,” Karen said, lolling her head in her direction.

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“Do you think this is secretly a mental institution?” Jess looked at her as one looks at a naughty dog. Then she tilted her head, as if weighing the idea. She pressed the certificate she was working on to the blue cardstock.

“Kare, can I ask you something?” She said, still not making eye-contact.

“I mean, you always do anyways. Go ahead.”

“Why do you think I work here?”

“Student debt? That time you broke the door to your house and then that time you broke that car door?  You’ve got a knack for breaking things, Jess, have you ever thought of anger management? It’s gotta be cheaper than being fined for property damage.”

Jess crumpled the certificate in her hands. Karen sat up in alarm. She must have said something wrong, Jess was shaking.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“Girl, chill out. I _am_ doing anger management. It’s not that. Think, bitch. Why do I work here?”

Karen reeled a little from the ‘bitch.’ Jess hadn’t said it affectionately like she usually did. What was with the sudden mood? What was she getting at?

She tried to think. Jess showed up a month after Karen started working the front desk. She came with a recommendation from Hogarth up in high management, which was weird since Karen had to show her how to do even the most basic secretary things, like using Excel and the fax machine. She had a bad attitude, she was awful at greeting people and answering phones. She was entirely disorganized; in effect, there was no reason anyone should have hired her to begin with, unless someone had it out for Mabel, their supervisor.

There were a few things Jess was good at. Photocopying. Terrifying information out of clients. Keeping a truly awe-inspiring catalogue of office gossip. Scaring away potential clients. She was amazing at all that. It was almost as if she was doing it on purp—

“Jess,” Karen said slowly and lowly, trying to keep her heart steady, “You aren’t a secretary are you?”

Jess flashed her some teeth. “Now she’s thinking.” She started in on a new piece of cardstock.

“Who--? Why--?”

“I mean, you didn’t hear it from me, but Hogarth hired me to do a little digging.”

“Digging? You’re a--?”

“P.I.” Karen clapped a hand over her mouth to muffle her gasp.

“I was _right_.”

“Congratulations.”

“You’re a _spy._ ”

“No, but it rhymes, so close enough.”

“But why? This is a technical college.” Jess barked a loud laugh. Then lowered her voice, despite the fact that the security cameras in the lobby didn’t record sound.

“Yeah, and like half of the enrolled students have open missing persons reports out on them. Not weird at all.” There was a painful twist in Karen’s diaphragm.

“Half?”

“Half.”

“So Murdock, he really did go missing.” Jess drew a rectangle and then an ‘X’ on the back of a certificate and smoothed it onto the cardstock. She picked up another sheet of navy.

“Murdock is interesting; he went missing, enrolled here, then he went missing from here, and then he came back. And now, would you look at that, he’s missing again.” Jess tapped a finger on the computer in front of her with the course rosters open on it. Karen was positive Murdock had been highlighted in blue just a second ago, but he was orange again. Graduated.

Karen stared at the screen.

“What are they doing to him?” She asked. “What are they doing to all of them?”

“Don’t know anything for sure honey, but me and Jeri have a pretty good idea,” She barked a laugh again, “Or maybe it’s a pretty bad idea.”

Karen reached over and took a handful of the certificates and then a handful of the cardstock. She rustled around in her desk drawer for a glue stick.

“How can I help?” She asked, drawing an ‘X’ on the back of the paper like Jess. Jess hummed.

“Are you sure you want to get involved? Shit’s about to get real.” Karen added the finished certificate to the pile between them and reached for another piece of cardstock.

“Well I’m gonna be unemployed soon anyways, may as well go down swinging.” Jess paused and looked at her.

“I like you, Page.” Karen grinned.

 

 

Jeri Hogarth was the kind of woman who Karen couldn’t decide if she wanted to be or fuck. She paid a ‘surprise’ visit to the front desk the next day and then offered, graciously, to take the people holding up this fine institution to lunch.

At an innocent café with fake flowers and checkered napkins on the table, she swore Karen to secrecy.

“Miss Page, there is no coming back from this and ‘this’ is more than just a cute corruption case,” she said over the rim of her Americano. Karen didn’t touch hers.

“I understand.”

“You would be putting yourself in danger.”

“I understand.” Hogarth grinned like a shark behind the cup. She set it down. Jess turned her gaze back on them from where it had been directed through the window.

“She’s safe with me,” she said with a finality that made Karen wonder if it wasn’t a threat in itself. Hogarth huffed.

“Alright, fine, but on your heads be it.” She leaned forward slightly, “Miss Page, tell me what you know about androids.” Karen startled.

“Androids?”

“Is there an echo in here? Yes, androids.” Hogarth said with a judgmental eyebrow.

“Uh, well. There are androids. In the world. They do a lot of service jobs. Some people don’t like that. Uh—”

“What kinds of jobs?” Hogarth asked as Jess waved a waitress over for a coffee refill. Karen blinked.

“Well, IT. Customer service. Website administration. Uh, fast food service, for the big chains.”

“You’re killing me, Jeri,” Jess moaned, her hands full of hot coffee, “Military, Page. She’s getting at military service.”

“Soldiers?” Karen reeled back. “No, I heard—people said they can’t be soldiers. They can’t make decisions by themselves, that’s what everyone was fighting about a few years back.”

Hogarth hummed.

“But what if they could—be soldiers I mean?”

Karen had to stop and process this. She took a sip of her lukewarm Americano. It was bitter.

“How?”

Hogarth shifted and Jess leaned onto the table, as though she was blocking someone else from looking at them.

“A few years back,” Hogarth started, “When I was still working at our firm, some police turned up for consultation on some weird cases. A couple of guys got caught trying to put an end to another couple of guys. They were all trashed, but no one was leaking any blood. Cooling fluid, though. In spades. The officers thought they were smuggling cooling gel, the kind you put in bots, but when they got the guys out of their clothes it turned out it was them who were leaking.” Karen had the mental image of blue anti-freeze pooling on a tile floor.

“They sent them to a bot lab for analysis and while one of them was hooked up, he started screaming,” Hogarth continued, “Not like, the alarm screaming that bots do, but screaming-screaming. No one could make any sense of it, he was just wailing nonsense, but he kept referring to himself as ‘I.’ We didn’t think anything of it, until a few months later when the same thing happened with a girl. They plugged her in to look at her logs and she started talking crazy just like the other guy.”

“That could be anything,” Karen said, “Bots use ‘I’ all the time, people wouldn’t understand them otherwise.”

“Maybe,” Hogarth mused, “But usually they use ‘I’ in reference to functions they perform. ‘I’ can do that for you. ‘I’ cannot help you with that. These bots were saying things like ‘I hurt.’ ‘I’m scared.’ ‘I don’t want that.’” There was a lull.

“What happened to them?” Karen asked.

“They shut off. Couldn’t turn them back on. Broken, unfixable. Mind you, most of them had beaten the shit out of each other to begin with. The damage was shocking. Humans tend to have limits, but bots will tear each other apart limb by limb. Anyways,” Hogarth took a sip of coffee.

“We ran their faces through the bot regs’ database to find out their donors, because if someone was using bots like that without explicit permission from the donor or next of kin and families found out, it was going to be a legal nightmare. Who do you sue? The bot regs? The industry? Some guy in his basement? But, anyways, none of them showed up. That doesn’t happen. So, one guy decided he was going to run the faces through the police database and voila. Two of them, one arrested for assault with a deadly weapon, one for spousal abuse. But neither of them served jailtime. A few guys asked around and found that they both had missing person reports out on them. They looked through the missing persons’ register and there they were. Every one of them.” Karen swallowed. Hogarth leaned back a bit.

“Now why would you use a human donor-bot to fight when you could just use a full artificial one?” She asked.

“They can--? But they can’t--” Karen tried.

“We don’t actually know,” Hogarth interrupted gently, “We don’t know if they can make decisions. The NGO I am associated with is doing research into that. For now, all we know is that there’s something about them which makes them damn good soldiers. Most bots hit 33% functionality and shut down. These guys can go way below that; one got as low as 19% before they fried themselves.”

Karen fidgeted with her cup. Hogarth and Jess obviously thought that Advancement had something to do with this whole mess. Her throat felt tight. She was scared that people who she’d given information to, who she’d arranged tours for, had decided to apply to Advancement. What if they’d been accepted? What if these two were right and Advancement was churning out human-bots? Was she responsible for some of this?

“Some of the people—”She choked out, blinking back tears, “Why don’t they leave? They’ve got to realize at some point what’s happening to them.”

“Some of the bot regs suggested that they might be too scared to. One of the guys in that department, I think he’s left now, said that devotion might be driving them. He thought they’d committed or attached themselves to some sort of cause and after they were in it, whoever was making them burned out everything but that. It would make them loyal, to a fault.”

Karen had nothing to say to that. Advancement was the perfect front for some kind of ‘cause.’ The other two stayed silent. The clinking of silverware and ceramic plates filled the space around them.

“I want to stop this.” Karen whispered, a few tears escaping. She thought of Danny sitting in the corner. Of the big guy called Luke who she’d found a few times as she locked up for the night, wearing one of the ‘paint-ball’ vests and holding a broom by the cleaning supply cupboard, motionless. She thought about Elektra’s thick, gorgeous hair and the way that she walked as she led various groups of ‘paintball’ members out to the van.

She knew in her heart that they were people. They’d been human. Their weird habits weren’t android, they were scraps of real-life, of the people they’d been before Advancement.

“She’s serious,” said Jess, reaching over all of them and dislodging a handful of napkins. She shoved them at Karen.

“Are you, Miss Page?” Hogarth asked. Karen nodded, unable to make words happen. Hogarth hummed and then paused in deep thought, a wrinkle deepening in her forehead. Karen scrubbed her face and coughed.

“What do you need?” She managed to squeeze out, sounding half as desperate as she did in her head. Jess cocked her head and raised an eyebrow before turning towards Hogarth.

“There are some people we need more information from,” Hogarth said, “People who have been getting suspicious. There’s a woman who calls every day, I believe her name is Colleen, who might be of help. There was another woman, a nurse who called for a while, too. I think she was escorted from the premises once.” She paused. “Have you received any calls like this? Asking about ‘students’?”

Karen frowned.

“There was a guy from Columbia asking after Murdock, the other day,” she offered. Hogarth and Jess jerked their heads towards each other. Hogarth gave Jess a scathing look which clearly said ‘bitch, you have one job,’ but Jess was unmoved. She leaned over and whispered something into Hogarth’s ear.

“Mr. Murdock is an…anomaly,” Hogarth told Karen lowly, “he’s the only one who seems to come and go. If you can help Jessica find out what Columbia wants with him, or where he’s going, or even better, what he’s doing when he goes, maybe we can get him alone outside of the institution. If we can isolate him from the others and get a tracker on him, maybe get into his logs, we might be able to figure out more about where we need to focus our efforts.”

Karen took a deep breath. She had one job. Help Jess. That was manageable.

“I can do that.”

 

 

Now that she had a picture of the guy in front of her, Karen could confirm that Murdock was damn fine. And damn blind. Fuck. How do you make a blind droid fight?

 _Unimportant_ , Jess’s bored voice snapped in her head. The person herself was shuffling through the backroom, destroying Karen’s precise filing system with silent glee. Karen resolved not to be bothered about this because Jess always had some kind of method to her madness.

The good thing about Murdock being blind was that it made him stand out. Before he went missing, he wore dark sunglasses and used a stick. He had a very characteristic smirk, which she was sure she could identify if she saw it out and about.

Jess swore as what sounded like a paper organizer fell off the back counter.

It brought her back to reality.

Okay. Find Murdock. First thing’s first, call back Columbia. She googled the university website and tried to navigate their allegedly-easy-to-navigate website. It was very blue. And very cream. She hated it already.

The Registrar didn’t list their staff on their webpage (of course they didn’t), so Karen, in all her Admin. experience did the next best thing. She dialed the number on the page and waited very patiently—so patiently—for the five minutes it took for the damn elevator music to stop playing and for someone whose soul was presently attempting to evacuate their human form to answer the phone.

“Hello,” said the impending vampire, “Columbia University, Registrar. How can I help you today?”

“Hi,” Karen pepped into the phone, “My name is Karen Page, I work in administration at Advancement Technical Institute. I received a call from someone from your office the other day requesting some, well, complicated transcripts and I’d like to touch base with that person to make sure they got where they needed to be.”

“Oh sure,” the vampire said, sounding relieved that she wasn’t a student, “Who did you talk to?”

“Franklin, uh, Warner, I think he said his name was.”

“Franklin Warner?” the voice repeated.

“Yes, that’s what he said.” There was a pause on the line and the sound of someone clicking a mouse. Probably bringing up the staff directly.

“Uh, I’m sorry ma’am, I think there’s been a mistake. We don’t have a Franklin Warner in our office, or uh, in any office at the university right now. We haven’t even had a Frank since like 2010.” Karen’s chest constricted. Hey, keep calm now, that was only like, the third worst possible thing that could happen.

“Oh,” she said, “I’m so sorry, maybe someone was playing a trick or something. That’s not great. He sounded like he really worked there a while, and he even had the student’s social.”

“We get weirdos like that too, honey, don’t even trip,” the vampire told her sympathetically, “It’s usually a family member trying to get info. Just report it and go on with your life, it’s not your responsibility to chase after people like that.”

Karen laughed into the phone and thanked the registrar before hanging up. Then she bolted into the backroom.

“Jess,” she gasped, “Jess that guy from Columbia doesn’t work at Columbia. And I sent him Murdock’s transcripts! Oh my god—”

“Bitch, chill out. That’s a good thing,” Jess griped from where she was sorting mail. With every package that went into a cubby, she added a piece of junk-mail. She was especially fond of hoarding the Viagra advertisements for this purpose.

“How is this a good thing?” Karen demanded. Jess didn’t even bother looking at her.

“It ain’t from Columbia, that means we don’t need to go through all their red tape. If some regular old Joe is feeding Murdock scraps to lure him into his house, we just need to find one guy.” Jess paused for a minute.

“Let’s assume that this guy-cat-lady-whoever, is not a complete moron,” she intoned, tipping her head back and forth as though weighing its thoughts, “He’d probably have to be, to be hiding a bot and collecting information on him. He’d probably want some plausible deniability. If that’s the case, some parts of his whole registrar story are probably true.” She took a handful of plastic-wrapped magazines and crammed them into the robotics department office box and added the only letter actually addressed to them on top.

“Maybe Columbia is the right place, but maybe the registrar is the wrong place.” Karen leaned against the back counter and ran her hands through the hair hanging on either side of her neck. And then it hit her.

“What if we’re looking for the wrong guy?” She asked. Jess turned just enough to give her The Judgmental Eyebrow.

“Uh-huh. Go on.”

“What if we just ask them for Murdock?” Jess snorted.

“Ask who? Columbia? Nah, girl. These people aren’t that stupid, they’re not gonna be throwing bots to the wind with full names attached.”

“Okay, well maybe part of the name? In a different department? Maybe as a student?”

“Murdock was a paralegal before he went under. He’d probably be the right age for a student, but bots, even good ones, aren’t human enough to go unnoticed for long. He’d eventually start with the ‘confirms’ and ‘negatives’ and that shit would give him right the fuck away.”

Karen grumbled and climbed up to sit on the counter. She swung her legs a little. Jess dropped the box of mail in her lap and she absently started pulling out ads.

“Well, where do the bots at Columbia live?” Jess hummed.

“Columbia’s fancy as shit. They’ve probably got like, an army of bots. They’re like prime real estate for the eventual bot revolution.”

“Okay, but like, where would I keep them?” Karen gave a giant orange pizza menu a cursory glance and set it on the ‘keep’ pile. Jess reached over and, with extreme distaste, moved it to the ‘recycle’ pile.

“I dunno, where people normally keep bots. IT desk. Library. Student support.”

Karen brightened.

“Okay, I’ll call those guys.” Jess gaped at her.

“Girl, you cannot be serious.”

“Talking on the phone’s not all that bad.”

“Yeah, if you’re a lonely vampire.”

“I’m only like, half-vampire.”

 

 

Columbia University’s library support desk told her that they didn’t have any bots called Matthew or Michael but put her in touch with the girl who did the bot maintenance for their team. She sounded small and scared and just how Karen imagined an awkward scientist would sound when confronted with social interaction. She said she didn’t have any bots starting with ‘M’ on her caseload but said that there was a Mike on the registration team. The gal who maintained the registration team said that her Mike had been out of commission “--some piece of shit drop kicked him and his skull’s been dented for weeks now, not even to mention hardware, Jesus, he’s so old, I’m gonna have to order whole new—" but she  said that the IT team had a slew of ‘M’s and transferred her to a guy named Ernst who told her that he didn’t have a Matthew or a Michael but he had a Matt, a Mike, a Mich, a Manny and a Michelle. He lovingly referred to them as the five stooges and Karen used every bit of willpower in her body to keep a straight face.

“Which one do you want?” he asked, the scraping sounds of whatever he was working on filtering through the phone.

“The Matt or the Mike, I think,” she said.

“You a debate student?” he asked.

“Uh, does that matter?” she replied, trying to remember what she sounded like as a student.

“Well, yeah. Matt’s the most popular for debate, but he’s got about a thousand bugs in him right now, so he’s about as useful as shovel with a hole in it. Mike’s up and running though; he’s alright for debate as long as you have wifi. I personally find that he does best when you let Judge Judy play in his core. On silent, obviously.”

Karen was more than a little gob-smacked at just how many bots Columbia had. Jess was right, if there ever was a revolution, Columbia would be ground zero. But she didn’t know now if she was looking for a broken bot or a working one and Jess was on her fifteen and it wasn’t like she could just call back.

“Um,” she said, trying to buy some time, “I’m actually not a debate student, I’m an art student—journalism. I’m looking for a bot to use in a project of mine, an article I’m writing, and I was wondering if you had one that was, you know, like, particularly human. I heard from some other people that one of the campus bots, M-something, could have fooled them.” Keep it together, Page. You’ve got this.

“What?” the guy asked dead-pan. He obviously thought she was crazy.

“It’s a story about like, how we anthropomorphize things and like, the bot is such an interesting study,” she lied with as much enthusiasm (and a bit of truth) as she could muster, “They look human, but they aren’t, but we make them human and we treat them like humans. I was hoping to, uh, try to experience it myself and then write my paper on it.”

There was a very long pause on the other side of the phone.

“Can I put you on hold?” the guy asked.

“Oh, sure thing,” she replied, heart pounding.

 

 

Ernst had a good memory, it made him good at his job and great in his field and the voice on the phone sounded oddly familiar. And the person was looking for a bot starting with ‘M’ and Ernst wasn’t stupid enough to find this a coincidence.

He put the gal on hold and hunted down George and Maiko. They agree that this was suspicious as fuck and called Foggy to let him know. Foggy, bless him, answered despite being in class. Out in the hall, he suggested that letting pictures of Matt get out were an absolute no-go, and he wasn’t too comfortable with having his newly-returned buddy cross-examined by a journalist. Matt might actually say something, which was the exact opposite of keeping a low profile. The police and bot regs were finally off their backs with the arrangement of an official bot-analysis on Matt later that week and the goal of the next few days was to not jeopardize Matt being around for that meeting.

Not to mention that whoever this was might be an agent of Advancement, trying to get their claws back into Matt.

They all agreed to give her the runaround.

 

 

“Hello, sorry I just spoke with my supervisor, just wanted to make sure what you’re asking for is within our rights to provide. You know, android law and confidentiality and all that,” Ernst said, nudging the tools on his desk closer and closer to the edge.

“Oh,” Karen answered, relieved that they hadn’t just hung up, “That’s good, what did they say? Are they okay with—” A terrible clanging and clattering cut her off. The guy swore. The phone was shuffled around rapidly and Karen heard the sound of screws rolling away to the tune of a distant, drawn out, ‘nooo.’

“Is everything okay?” She tried.

“I’m so sorry—my—it just—goddamnit—sorry let me give you to my colleague, I’ve got to—goddamnit!” The phone was audibly shoved into someone else’s hand.

“Hello?” Karen asked.

“Hello?” said the voice of the girl she’d spoken with earlier.

“Hi, is everything alright? That didn’t sound great.”

“Oh, yeah. Well actually, no. It’s all over the floor, we should get the magnets—”

“NOBODY MOVE.” Boomed a new voice loud enough that even Karen froze in place.

“Oh, shit,” the girl spat, “Sorry, we’ve got to—there’s a protocol for—ugh, Ernst are you _serious._ I’m so sorry, can you hold for just a second?”

“N-no problem,” Karen muttered. The place sounded like a death trap. Jess popped her head back in the door and looked at her quizzically. Karen covered the phone with her hand.

“Jess, I sincerely _hope_ that he is _not_ there.”

“Why?”

“It sounds like—” a tinny alarm rang through the phone suddenly and a chorus of furious shouting started. Jess stared at it like it was an explosive device.

“Yeah, it sounds like it. Fuck. You’d think with all that money—”

“I’M SO SORRY,” the first guy’s voice shouted into the receiver, “WE HAVE TO EVACUATE, CAN WE CALL YOU BACK?”

“O-Of course,” Karen said. The line went dead.

“Welp,” Jess purred, plucking the phone from Karen’s hand and smiling at it. “That sure sounded convenient to me. What’re you doing after work, Kare?”

 

 

Karen hadn’t been anywhere even half as fancy as Columbia University when she’d been a student, and she couldn’t contain her awe, while Jess strolled onto campus like she owned the place. Jess out of business-casual was exactly what Karen expected, although the camera was a nice touch. Karen had thrown on a pair of jeans and a giant hoodie.

“Hey, let’s not look like it’s our first day of school,” Jess snapped over her shoulder, finally noticing that Karen hadn’t quite made it on campus, “We’re on a mission, Kare.”

Right. IT department. Find the bot, Murdock with the smile.

They wandered around campus for a while, Jess occasionally taking pictures of thing in a mimicry of the photographers for the student paper before they found the IT department. It was in the library and closing up for the night when they walked in and they just caught a guy with a nametag that said “Nathaniel” before he locked the door.

Nathaniel told them that if they needed to rent a bot or technology after five, they’d have to do it through the robotics lab or the digital commons. He helpfully pointed them in the right direction.

Jess had nicked poor Nate’s ID right out of his back pocket as he bade them goodnight and was trying to figure out how to swipe it to get the door of the lab to open when Karen saw a guy, a little chubby with long blond hair and a dark green backpack, leaving through the side door. He was talking out loud and Karen realized, as they stepped out into the campus proper that there was a person walking close beside him. She frowned and watched and as they passed her. From behind, it looked like the latter was holding onto the former’s elbow. She realized Jess had stopped making frustrated noises.

Karen glanced at her and saw her thinking face. It looked a little like her pre-assault face.

“Page, what does that guy, the one in the blue, what does his shirt say?” She asked.

Karen squinted.

“IT Support.”

“They’re awfully close.”

“Wow Jess, didn’t pin you for a homoph—”

“Kinda like a guy leading the blind.”

Oh shit.

Jess grabbed a handful of her giant hoodie and took off at a sprint after them, leaping through a hedge so that they were running parallel to the pair rather than right behind them. Karen wondered if all spies felt the heart pumping adrenaline she did when they were out doing reconnaissance, or if that was just her being a rookie.

They abrupted slowed when they caught up with the two on the opposite side, and Karen covered her mouth to muffle her panting. Jess was unfazed.  

“I’ll tell you what it is, Matty, it’s suspicious as fuck is what it is,” The blond guy grumbled, hitching his backpack higher on his shoulder.

“Confirm?” The bot answered.

“Confirm. We’ve got what, two more days to keep it together? Yeah, I’m not buying any of that journalism shit.”

Good fucking god. Jess gave Karen abrupt wide eyes and she returned them.

“Confirm?”

“Confirm, pal.”

“Music?” The blond guy was silent in the skeptical way which Karen remember from the days of lying to her mother.

“That depends, are you gonna be good or are you gonna try to chew on my surge protector again?”

The bot didn’t answer.

“Yeah, that’s what I fucking thought.” The bot _whined._

Jess gave Karen wide eyes and clenched and shook a fist at chest level in silent triumph. Karen however, felt a stab in her gut because the bot _felt_ and he expressed himself and oh god, she’d been part of the thing which probably made him make that noise over and over and over. She swallowed hard.

They followed the two to a dorm, listening to the blond guy grumbling and bargaining long-sufferingly with the bot.

Once the door closed, Jess gave Karen one of the most terrifying smiles she’d seen in her life.

 


End file.
